I’m one of the makers of this - thank you for posting!
We built it in early 2024 and it’s due an update.
While the main visualisation is currently out of date we’ve been grabbing screenshots monthly for the last 18 months. There’s a a free (no key required) API to all the data at https://ScreenshotOf.com
I’d love to hear any ideas you have for improving it.
Thank you! This is exactly what I want to do with this. I have embeddings for all the images but hadn’t figured out the last step to getting them onto a grid like that. Can’t wait to try this.
Not gridfinity compatible, but I have a set of corner pieces that uses a similar concept. The majority of the material can be scrap acrylic, mdf, cardboard, etc. and you just print the corner pieces. Lids and stuff too.
If you are worried about this you might want to consider whether you have a healthy degree of concern about hygiene and bacteria. It could be worth speaking with a therapist.
I am not personally turned off by the hygiene of toilet paper rolls, but I think any rational adult's Overton Window should accommodate those who are. Your condescension is grossly unwarranted.
You don't have to be Adrian Monk to recognize that toilets are unsanitary.
I'm not sure where you got condescension from - I was going for genuine concern. Being irrationality concerned about hygiene is a warning sign for conditions like obsessive compulsive disorder.
Eh, it got a chuckle and eye roll outta me so I didn't mind.
And fwiw, I don't really care either wherever people use them for whatever they want, I am just still confused why people would want to use paper (sourced from leftover toilet utensils), which is notorious for being basically un-cleanable... as food storage, but to each their own.
I'm surprised how many people hate me for such (imo) mellow statement though
I don't really think anyone other than OCD/germaphobes thinks about toilet paper rolls in that way and it's certainly not "notorious". I'm pretty sure the general sentiment is that it's a perfectly benign material, often given to kids to play and craft with.
The same thing happened with that episode of mythbusters about the toilet ploom from flushing. A bunch of OCD/germaphobes lost their minds and have not stopped thinking about it since. Meanwhile the rest of society gave a collective shrug and couldn't even be bothered to move their toothbrush brush to another room or close the toilet lid while flushing.
This isn't a food storage thing, but I think I see where you got that idea from the photos in the link. He's showing the types of paperboard that work with his system. Old cereal boxes, coffee filter boxes, etc.
IIUC this is also true of most 3D-print materials. You should not be using Gridfinity to store food! This is also why you usually shouldn't 3D print a dildo.
This would be true even if the materials were food safe to be honest, I don't see how you can keep something like this clean.
It's for storing stuff like capacitors and screws and electrical tape.
context: 3D-print material like PLA is food safe, but due to the many edges and lines between the print layers it is basically impossible to clean to a food safe degree.
While theoretically you can get certified food-safe blend of PLA, the rest of the extrusion path must also be food-safe... I personally am not fond of eating hot degraded PTFE... Or the trace remains of charred ASA/ABS I printed last week through the same nozzle... Or in fact any of the various coatings of the heated bed or leftover trace amounts of previous prints...
It's just a black hole that I choose not to get into by not printing stuff that's expected to be in contact with food.
> I personally am not fond of eating hot degraded PTFE
If this is a problem, you should buy a new printer that actually keeps the filament conduits away from the hotend. This is a health hazard regardless of food safety - decomposed PTFE is nasty stuff to breathe in.
> Or the trace remains of charred ASA/ABS I printed last week through the same nozzle...
Fair enough, but I would also say that you should be purging old filament anyways before starting a new one. My slicer does this by default.
> Or in fact any of the various coatings of the heated bed or leftover trace amounts of previous prints...
These days, heated beds are covered in PEI. That's food-safe too.
I think your take is a little panicky and not supported by the evidence. It is perfectly fine to print single-use food stuff out of PLA, especially if you just have a roll or two of the pure (undyed) stuff around. You're much more likely to get sick from the food itself than the plastic it touched for a little while, and PLA is relatively biodegradable compared to most other plastic foodware.
> If this is a problem, you should buy a new printer that actually keeps the filament conduits away from the hotend
The filament is still in contact with the PTFE tube, the PTFE tube is also hand-cut by me and in motion with the head so it undergoes wear. Even when you get an all-metal hotend there are ways of contamination by PTFE passing through the hot-end and degrading into harmful chemicals.
> purging old filament anyways before starting a new one. My slicer does this by default.
I do purge and cold-pull. While this removes the bulk of the old filament it does not remove all trace amounts of it.
> These days, heated beds are covered in PEI. That's food-safe too.
It is food-safe only if it was produced in a food-safe manner and was kept food safe afterwards, including no contact with pollutants.
Since you mention evidence, I have no way of proving that anything I produce is food-safe. Literally not anything in my extrusion path is certified food-safe, let alone I have equipment to test.
The fact of the matter is that glass, ceramic, and stainless steel has replaced any vessels that are in contact with food at home, and I don't intend to look back on that, and I am in fact looking to replace anything in regular contact with human skin with non-synthetic/non-plastic alternatives -- this includes clothes, bed sheets and others.
While there is the hacking mindset, people also need to be responsible, and my red lines on that is making stuff with a safety aspect to it. Food safety is safety as much as fire and electrical safety in my book.
Also lead from brass nozzles. I think the risks are overblown, but recommending anything that is not recognized as food-safe for use with food is a liability, better safe than sorry, as they say.
There are food safe coatings though, these deal with the problem by making your 3D print not in contact with food.
The main solution I've heard is to just encapsulate the whole thing in foodsafe epoxy. Then it doesn't matter as much what the inner material in so long as you monitor for damage.
Yeah there are a couple that claim to be like this [0] one, and there are FDA standards to follow for that claim. I wouldn't use one on a cutting board or anything that gets scraped or cut on and you need to let it cure waaaay longer than normal but yeah there are options out there.
I think the hygiene issue is somewhat exaggerated. Early printing often didn't prioritize properly dried filament so the output often bubbled and had many pockmarks and imperfections where bacteria could grow. If you look at modern prints they are quite smooth and consistent.
Even so, if you want to be perfectly safe then apply a coat of polyurethane varnish and let it fully cure. That will seal any holes or voids where bacteria might grow, insulated from cleaning solutions.
Because some of us have like 200 cables, and toilet paper rolls is a cheap but effective way of getting some control over these :) And besides, I'm sure that my fingers and feet are more dirty when I touch/move any of the cables, than the toilet paper rolls that spent a couple of days in a bathroom.
I'm not sure if you're trying to say that's a lot or little? But yeah, each roll might survive 3-4 days at most I'd guess, but honestly can't say I've ever measured. We're two people (me and my wife) in the household fwiw.
It las us (household of two also) at least a week. I've found out in the past that I used way too much out of habit. Also for some reason triple ply needs less paper
Feels like a lot. Even 3-4 days does. I'm not judging though!
In my household with 3 adults, we go through maybe a roll every 2 weeks or so. It's almost exclusively used for number 2 business though, so maybe that accounts for some of that difference.
Or, we just use very different types of paper, and yours require more of it for the same effect. :)
might i suggest purchasing a bidet. you can get one for less than $50 on amazon and it will help you dramatically cut down on toilet paper. it also makes you feel so much cleaner. my two cents
> might i suggest purchasing a bidet. you can get one for less than $50 on amazon and it will help you dramatically cut down on toilet paper
You may suggest whatever you want :) We do have an installed bidet in our main bathroom, as most houses where I live has those. Tried it, didn't like it, will proceed with using paper as currently it doesn't have many drawbacks and doesn't leave me feeling "more dirty" afterwards than using water would.
You mean like a phone, that you later stick up to your face? I’m sure someone will chime in with how they “never use their phone in the bathroom”, which no one will believe.
I worry about the digestive health of people who use phones in the bathroom. I go in there for a specific job, which I focus on until completion. I never get bored enough to start looking for other things to do.
That is a great improvement, but best would be a combination of both designs, the former adding the "finder shelf that can also serve for labeling, and the slopped bottom that allows scooping out individual pieces.
Another improvement may be to make the top and bottom pieces stackable along with the snapping grid system compatibility.
Architecturally, it's very similar. We have the same vision! And they've done a great job, especially around writing to Iceberg. Some differences:
1. Our extension is fully open-source. I believe they've open-sourced bits of their stack.
2. We are unopionated about open table formats: Iceberg and Delta.
3. In v0.2, we will support small write workloads. This will open up time-series and HTAP workloads.
It's a similar idea, but Crunchy Data Warehouse was built by several founding engineers of Citus, which lets us speedrun through it :)
It's a generally available (very solid) product powering some large production workloads, with fully transactional Iceberg, and auto-compaction. All SQL queries and almost all Postgres features are fully supported on Iceberg tables.
We are also seeing interesting patterns emerging with the ability to load/query csv/json/parquet/shapefile/... directly from S3 in combination with pg_parquet and pg_incremental. For instance, incrementally & transactionally loading CSV files that show up in S3 into Iceberg, or periodically exporting from Postgres to Parquet and then querying with data warehouse.
We first launched it as "Crunchy Bridge for Analytics" in April last year. At the time, it could mostly query/import/export Parquet/CSV/JSON. Our goal was to build a data warehouse, but getting early feedback was helpful and we did not want to misrepresent the offering.
In November last year we added Iceberg support and managed storage, so it became a full data warehouse experience with writes and transactions and we renamed it to Crunchy Data Warehouse.
If you’re worried about the security risks, edge cases, maintenance pain and scaling challenges of self hosting there are various solid hosted alternatives:
Looking at your urlbox - pretty funny language around the quota system.
>What happens if I go over my quota?
>No need to worry - we won't cut off your service. We automatically upgrade you to the next tier so you benefit from volume discounts. See the pricing page for more details.
So... If I go over the quota you automatically charge me more? Hmm. I would expect to be rejected in this case.
In my experience our customers are more worried about having the service stop when they hit the limit of a tier than they are about being charged a few more dollars.
Maybe I'm misreading. It sounds like you're stepping the user up a pricing tier - e.g. going from 50 a month to 100 and then charging at the better rate.
I would also worry about a bug on my end that fires off lots of screenshots. I would expect a quota or limit to protect me from that.
That’s right. On our standard self-service plans we automatically charge a better rate as volume increases. You only pay the difference between tiers as you move through them.
It’s rare that anyone makes that kind of mistake. It probably helps that our rate limits are relatively low compared to other APIs and we email you when you get close to stepping up a tier. If you did make such a mistake we would, like all good dev tools, work with you to resolve. If it happened a lot we might introduce some additional controls.
We’ve been in this business for over 12 years and currently have over 700 customers so we’re fairly confident we have the balance right.
I'm not a customer, so don't take what I say too seriously, but to me it seems like you are unilaterally making a purchasing decision on my behalf. That is, I agreed to pay you 50 dollars a month and you are deciding I should pay 100 (or more) - to "upgrade" my service. My intuition is that this is probably not legal, and, if I were a customer, I would not pay for a charge that I didn't explicitly agree to - if you tried to charge me I would reject it at the credit card level.
If I sign up for a service to pay X and get Y, then I expect to pay X and get Y - even if my automated tools request more than Y - they should be rejected with a failure message (e.g. "quota limit exceeded").
https://www.scraperapi.com/ is good too. Been using them to scrape via their API on websites that have a lot of captchas or anti scraping tech like DataDome.
What’s the chance you’re affiliated? Almost every one of your comments links to it. And curiously similar interest in Rust from the official HN page and yours. No need to be sneaky.
robots.txt isn't legally binding. I am interested to know if and how services even interact with it. It's more like a clue on when the interesting content for scrapers is on your site. This is how I imagine it goes:
there's also our product, Airtop (https://www.airtop.ai/), which is under the scraping specialist / browser automation category that can generate screenshots too.
Hey I'm curious what your thoughts are on whether you need a full blown agent that moves the mouse and clicks to extract contents from webpages or a more simplistic tool that can just scrape pages + take screenshots and pass it through an LLM is generally pretty effective?
I can see niches cases likes videos or animations being better understood by an agent though.
Airtop is designed to be flexible, you can use it as part of a full-blown agent that interacts with webpages or as a standalone tool for scraping and screenshots.
One of the key challenges in scraping is dealing with anti-bot measures, CAPTCHAs, and dynamic content loading. Airtop abstracts much of this complexity while keeping it accessible through an API. If you're primarily looking for structured data extraction, passing pages through an LLM can work well, but for interactive workflows (e.g., authentication, multi-step navigation), an agent-based approach might be better. It really depends on the use case.
I had so much fun with this with my 7 year old. Was super easy to take their art and make games with it. You can start by editing one of the many example games it comes with.
I’m one of the makers of this - thank you for posting!
We built it in early 2024 and it’s due an update.
While the main visualisation is currently out of date we’ve been grabbing screenshots monthly for the last 18 months. There’s a a free (no key required) API to all the data at https://ScreenshotOf.com
I’d love to hear any ideas you have for improving it.